


A Pair of Paper Masks

by Mephistophelia



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Asexual Enjolras, But He Is Not Good At Them, Canon Era, Enjolras Has Feelings, First Meetings, Getting Together, Letters, M/M, My self-imposed POV Enjolras challenge because He is Me and I am Him, POV Enjolras
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-12
Updated: 2020-01-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:36:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22219423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mephistophelia/pseuds/Mephistophelia
Summary: "This is the worst part of me. And you draw it out of me like a skein of yarn week after week until I hate myself, hate what you’ve made me, hate you for allowing me to become it.The hate for you, though, doesn’t last."Enjolras writes letters to the cynical, wine-drunk man who has begun attending meetings at the Café Musain. They don't end the way they begin.
Relationships: Enjolras/Grantaire (Les Misérables)
Comments: 20
Kudos: 117





	A Pair of Paper Masks

**Author's Note:**

> We're trying something new here, friends! Actually, a few new things. First person, epistolary form, POV Enjolras: all things I've never done before. I hope it doesn't suck.
> 
> (Also, is this loosely inspired by the Act 2 opener for Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812? Hundo percent.)

22 Oct. 1831

M. Grantaire,

My thanks for your contributions yesterday evening at the Cafe Musain. I fully understand that in growing used to a new way of thinking—any time a great, seismic change is considered—a few misperceptions will need to be corrected, and I hope our early clashes over philosophy won't dissuade you from returning.

Bahorel tells me you're an artist. I have no head for painting myself, but I should very much like to hear your theories on the subject at our next meeting.

Wishing you health,

Michel Enjolras

* * *

29 Oct.

M. Grantaire,

I confess I don’t know how I’ve deserved such a scathing reply from you. You cannot seriously expect me to listen to your outbursts of anarchic nihilism and think that they belong in our movement, or that I myself will soon come round to your way of thinking.

Everything we do is in service of a higher meaning—the highest. If you cannot understand this, then perhaps Bahorel was wrong to invite you to attend. We aren't men of God, monsieur, but to a man Les Amis de l’ABC are men of faith. Liberation will never come without belief to anchor it.

Tell me, then. What do you believe in, that leaves you so fixed in your doubts?

Enjolras

* * *

5 Nov.

Grantaire,

Don’t think I'm so much of a high-minded idealist that I don’t know when I’m being baited. I have more important things to do than listen to you provoke me.

You claim to believe in me—who you’ve known a fortnight, and whose every opinion and belief you scorn. If this is a riddle, I beg you to leave it be. Just as I have no head for art, I have no head for words whose faces do not match their hearts.

Enjolras

* * *

17 Nov.

Grantaire,

I was too harsh with you in my last note; forgive me. 

It will not surprise you, I think, to learn that Jehan noted the tension between us last night and demanded to know what had happened between us. After learning the tenor of our conversation, he looked at me as if I were Caligula and said if I did not apologize, he would compose a poem eviscerating my faults and read it aloud at our next meeting. An odd threat, perhaps, but an effective one. And enough to open my eyes and show me that I have been behaving like a child.

You called me, jokingly, a god in your last letter, but my temper is one of the least godlike things about me. I work to control it, but I am not always the best master of my own brain. It escapes me sometimes, and my feelings spiral off and become stronger than they ought to be: anger, sadness, anxiety, fear. Somehow, you seem to provoke all of these in me at once, and many others I don’t know how to name.

Clearly I am out of practice in the art of apology.

Know, then, that I am truly sorry for how I spoke to you, and let us leave it there.

In the hopes that you do not utterly despise me, I’ve enclosed a short list of books I’ve found helpful and comforting as I shaped my own philosophy. I don’t mean to presume, but if any of the titles interest you, you're more than welcome to call at my flat any time to borrow them. Assuming, of course, my tangled notes in the margins don’t frighten you off.

(You need not come, of course, if you don’t wish to.)

(If you do come, there’s no need to send word ahead. I am on the whole a solitary creature when at home, so a visitor will not interrupt me.)

(Though I say again, if you don’t wish to come, I quite understand, and don't mean to impose.)

Enjolras

* * *

2 Dec.

Grantaire,

I promised myself I wouldn’t write to you so soon after your visit. At this rate, you’ll think me monomaniacal, unable to concede an argument once I’ve lost it. Well, in that respect you’d be right, and I’m not ashamed of it. If I must argue with my dying breath for what I believe to be just, I will do it.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what you said as you scanned my bookcase, nor about the curl of your lip as you read the names of those great philosophers and revolutionaries on the leather spines. I keep remembering your smirk—yes, monsieur, the smirk—as you said “Surely a rich boy has some better way to waste his time than trying on equality like the latest fashion.”

I said nothing at the time, to my shame. I have never had the pretty skill of cloaking my words in politeness and convention. I knew if I spoke then what was in my heart, you would take offense and leave, and you would never speak to me again. Why this prospect troubled me I cannot say, but it did, and does still.

So think of this as what I would have said yesterday, edited only with the coolness of time and distance.

Let me be clear, Grantaire: you know nothing of me. Would you like to know what drew me away from my parents’ home in the south, what brought “a rich boy” to the heart of Paris? I will tell you.

I departed Toulouse the day after I watched a man I loved dearly shot in the back by the National Guard.

His crime? He had written a letter—a private letter, to me—containing insults against the king. My father, well-connected with the guard and aware of my affection, knew exactly which punishment would hurt me the most for my involvement. He secured me a pardon, but forced me to attend the execution. He wanted me to hear the friend I loved dearly beg for his life, to smell his blood thick in the summer air, and to know that if I did not stop consorting with such radicals and traitors, then all I had to look forward to was a bullet between my own shoulders.

I learned a lesson that day I will carry with me until I die, and it wasn’t the one my father hoped I’d learn. I learned that I could do two things with my life: I could witness, and I could resist. 

No friend, no husband, no wife, no parent should see what I saw then. Thousands of them have. One more, no doubt, in the time it's taken me to compose this letter. If there’s anything I can give to spare others that fate, then I will give it.

If, after this tirade, you no longer wish to associate with me, you need not respond. The Rousseau I lent you is yours to keep. The rich boy can buy himself another.

Enjolras

PS: You seem to have left a glove at my flat. I shall have it sent to you through Bossuet, so you need not be troubled by me in person. This winter is a bitter one, and no man should face it barehanded.

* * *

20 Dec.

Grantaire,

Your presence at tonight’s meeting was most welcome, as were your contributions to the discussion. On my soul, if you would simply leave the bottle behind, yours would be a political mind for the ages. I still don’t agree with you on the subject of allocating parliamentary delegates by geographic area rather than by population density, but I shall withhold further debate until I’ve had the chance to consult the library. You may read the remainder of this letter without threat of further harassment from me.

All right, a small lie on my part. There is one somewhat unpleasant point I mean to raise, though whether this constitutes harassment is yours to judge.

I saw your face as you spoke to Feuilly at the end of tonight’s meeting, and—my pen is ill equipped to describe what I thought I saw in your eyes. Sorrow is a flat and hollow word for it, and despair is worse still. Yes, Grantaire, I pay attention to things that are not the ghost of Robespierre. (I also heard you tell Courfeyrac I don’t pay attention to anything that isn’t the ghost of Robespierre. Your voice, monsieur, carries.)

I know we aren’t friends, not in the way that Combeferre is mine or Bahorel is yours. But I hope you know that I look on you with care and concern, as I do for all of the Amis. If you don’t wish to speak to me—and I will admit as readily as anyone that my presence is too often a cold comfort—at least know that any man among the Amis is ready at any moment to listen, and to help, and not judge.

Don't make the mistake, as I first did, of believing that shutting others out of your pain is a signifier of strength. We are stronger when together. This is the founding principle of the Amis—of which, it bears repeating, I hope you consider yourself one.

I shall conclude this tedious letter by blaming its uncharacteristically sentimental nature on the approaching Christmas holiday. I shall also remind you of your promise to produce some sketches for our pamphlets by the first meeting of the new year, and reiterate forcefully that contributions of an erotic nature are not at all solicited.

Joyeux Noel,

Enjolras

* * *

20 Jan. 1832

Grantaire,

The sketches are exceptional. You undersell your talents shamefully. You are very good, and you may take me at my word because you know I have never lied to be polite in all my life. I shall call on you next week to discuss the layout of the new pamphlets, and to solicit your opinion on another matter besides. I shall not, I hope, oppress you too much with my presence.

E

* * *

2 Feb.

Monsieur,

I write to tell you to refrain from attending any and all future meetings at the Café Musain, and cease our correspondence upon receipt of this letter.

Had I known how much you despised me, I should never have imposed my company on you. Heaven knows my attempt to engage a drunken, shiftless cynic was not for _my_ benefit.

I know you think me a man made of stone, but I am as human as you. I can feel, I can want, my heart can break as yours can.

I do not wish you ill, but I am no saint, and some things I cannot forgive.

* * *

23 Feb. [Unsent]

Grantaire,

How dare you. Three weeks now since we last spoke and all I can hear through the silence of my flat is your voice, repeating those damned words, words you had to know would cut, and cut deep. “Easy to die for an idea when you have nothing else to live for.”

They are thoughtless words, impulsive, and incorrect in every way it’s possible for one person to be incorrect. Why then can’t I stop thinking about them?

You think me close-minded, cold, rational to the point of heartlessness. Well, perhaps. You think I’m afraid of nothing, that every sacrifice I make comes gladly. There you are wrong.

I regret to destroy the marble god you cruelly profess to believe in, but I think and love and dream and fear—if not quite as you do—then like a man, and with a man’s weakness.

Death frightens me, Grantaire. Not only my own death, though God knows how many nights I start awake in a cold sweat after sensing in dreams the end of something. But the death of my friends, who are my family, my beloveds, my second selves. Witty Courfeyrac and his absurd waistcoats, that unrestrained laugh, his ability to turn the darkest mood toward the light. Combeferre, loyal and fearless and practical, closer to me than a brother, more in possession of my soul than I am. Jehan, alive to all manner of beauty. Feuilly, selfless and kind and utterly without pretension.

You think I am heartless because I shun my family, because I take no lovers, because I dedicate my nights to the work and not frivolity. Very well. Call me a prodigal son—I am that. Call me repressed and cloistered—this is not quite true, but I don’t know how to explain to you that there’s simply nothing within me to repress, that venial matters are nothing but a source of wild indifference to me—a man like you cannot understand this, so leave off, and say I shun sex for wicked reasons.

But never say to me that I don’t love, or that I loosen my grip on this life without hesitation. Don’t profess to know what’s in my heart.

I can’t send this. I feel mad having written it. And yet the room feels lighter with these words out of me. I don’t know why it matters so much to me that you understand me rightly, that you judge me according to my true nature. I’ve been misjudged before, and borne it with far greater equanimity than I do now. But I find it desperately important that you, Grantaire, see me for who I am, and respect or despise me on my own merits. I can't say why, but I do.

Enough of this. Writing letters no one will read. There is work to be done.

* * *

4 March (Unsent)

It’s past two in the morning, and I cannot sleep. Three hours until I ought to be awake. Five hours until I ought to be in class. Seventeen hours until our meeting at the Musain. Twenty until I will be back alone in this room again, with another chance at sleep. Twenty hours. I cannot permit myself to cry for twenty hours.

If you could see me now, Grantaire, you’d hardly recognize me. Yes, I still direct these letters to you, because somehow there are still things I want you to know, though I'd rather die than tell you. You wouldn’t listen anyway. Not to a man whose hands shake throughout the night, whose nerves are stretched so tightly across his body that whatever is keeping him together will soon snap.

I have been like this before. I will be like this again. And yet every time the anxiety returns, it feels like the first time, and I’m as convinced as ever that I won’t survive it. I fear to survive it.

And God, I want you _here_.

I saw you today in Les Halles, though you did not see me. You were walking with a woman—she had catalpa blooms woven into her hair, and I couldn’t shake the thought that you had put them there. The two of you walked through the market stalls, you laughing at something she’d said, and I burned, Grantaire, I burned. I knew then that I would never be as alive as you.

I'm not the kind of man who will laugh like that in the street, who could take someone’s hand in that casual way of yours, without asking yet certain of being accepted. You and that woman, you inhabited a place I could not enter, and from there rose the ache in my chest, the ache that has brought me here at two-thirty in the morning according to my watch, thinking of everything I despise in myself.

Thinking of you.

Another thing you wouldn’t understand if I told you in person: I suspect, on nights like this, that I am not human. Not in the way that you are. I'm not real in the way you are real, grounded within yourself, certain and careless. Able to take someone’s hand and know your fingers won’t simply pass through hers, as if you’re nothing more than an idea given temporary form.

It makes me want, desperately, to touch you. To see what a man as real as you feels like. To see if you could feel a man like me at all.

Nineteen hours, twenty minutes until I am here again.

* * *

17 March

M. Grantaire,

I received word through Courfeyrac that you wished to attend meetings at the Musain again, but feared incurring my displeasure if you did. I remind you, again, that I am not the leader of the Amis. If my fellow members vouch for you—and they do, Courfeyrac most insistently—then the group has admitted you, and I should feel no displeasure at all in aligning myself with their decision.

I shall expect to see you this Thursday at seven in the usual place, where I will be eager to hear if your opinions have shifted at all since last we spoke.

Cordially,

Enjolras

* * *

24 March

Grantaire,

I thank you for your concern, but I am perfectly fine. I cannot express my embarrassment that you saw me last night in such a state. I haven’t been sleeping well, and combined with the work and several more personal matters, I find my emotions closer to the surface than they ought to be. I thought you had all left after the meeting, and I allowed myself to express my exhaustion in a way that I would not have done, had I known you were present.

Again, I thank you for your concern, but ask you not to speak of it again.

Enjolras

* * *

2 April

Grantaire,

I will not be called withholding and repressed, not from a man who's never expressed a proper emotion without the aid of a bottle. The day you speak to me without your armor of cynicism and wine, the day you tell me what you truly feel about anything, then you may judge me for keeping my emotions close, but not a moment before.

E

* * *

7 April (Unsent)

It’s no surprise that you despise me. I despise myself.

I despise _this._

I’ve never wanted this, though you seem to believe I do. This—this sparring, this sickening dance where you push me and push me and poke holes in the same arguments I’ve spent a week’s worth of sleepless nights doubting, until you pull from me the cruelest words I can conjure in a desperate bid for peace.

This is the worst part of me. And you draw it out of me like a skein of yarn week after week until I hate myself, hate what you’ve made me, hate you for allowing me to become it.

The hate for you, though, doesn’t last.

Combeferre asked me last night if I had seen a doctor. He told me I looked too thin, too pale, that my behavior these past weeks has been unlike myself. I didn’t know how to tell him that for what’s wrong with me now, no doctor in the world could help.

If you would only look on me kindly, even once, I think I could bear it. Just one memory of you looking at me as I am a person, one who, like Shakespeare’s king, “lives with bread, feels want, tastes grief, needs friends.” With that memory to ballast me, I think I could bear it all.

* * *

21 April

Grantaire,

I simply wanted to thank you for your contributions to our gathering this week—they did not go unnoticed.

It was also a pleasure to see a new side of you this week, a lighter side. I refer, of course, to the way you looked after the gamin. You have a way with children, one I must confess I didn’t expect. The boy was frankly enamored of you, anyone could see it. For a child who’s received little enough love in his life, being the object of your attention for an evening must have seemed like the richest gift. I thank you, on his behalf, for that.

It made me realize how little I know of you. Whether you have siblings, nieces, nephews, children, whether you want children, whether you are in love, what you care about that is not art or wine or tormenting me to the point of madness. The other members of the Amis I know intimately, but you have always kept yourself at a remove, and this week you reminded me of it.

I don’t know why I’m sending this letter, exactly, except that I’ve barely slept in days and my brain is not working well enough for me to think better of it. Consider it a mad whim of a man you cannot respect, and scorn me in private if you like, but think nothing more of it than that.

E

* * *

29 April

Grantaire,

Don’t lie to me. You meant something by it. Your terse “it was nothing” was a lie, and I know it.

I’ve lived twenty-two years with nothing. I know nothing in my bones, as clearly as I know myself or clearer still. _That_ was not nothing.

“Nothing” would have been following Bossuet and Jehan out of tonight’s meeting immediately, as is your usual way. “Nothing” would have been to leave me alone to gather my papers and steady my mind for the walk home, where I could be in bed again with my thoughts and you none the wiser.

But that’s not what you did, is it, Grantaire?

No. Let me tell you what you did.

You hung back, long after the others had gone. Even Combeferre thought it strange. Did you see the way he glanced at me, as if to ask whether I would be all right left alone with you? I doubt it. You never struck me as having an eye for matters of that nature. Even that night, you’d hardly noticed I was nearly at the point of panic throughout the entire meeting, brought there by you.

In any case. You stayed, and you watched me without saying anything. Unless I am very much mistaken, I saw pity in your eyes then. And you asked me, in a softer voice than any I had heard you use before, if I was all right.

I couldn’t answer. I was manifestly not all right. How could I be, when you were standing there in front of me, paint still under your fingernails, your hair out of your face with a ribbon but still enough of it tumbling toward your eyes to drive me half-mad with distraction. How could I tell you that I hated you and loved you, feared you and longed for you, as a penitent to his god?

I couldn’t say that. Even writing it now sounds like pure raving. I’m not expressing myself correctly, even on paper, and if I’m adrift on paper what hope could there possibly be in person?

And then speech became doubly impossible when, struck by my silence, you reached out and put a hand on my shoulder.

That was not “nothing,” Grantaire. Not to me.

You had never touched me of your own volition before, only grudgingly shaking my hand after I proffered mine. I had noticed that, been stung by that, many times before. But this. You couldn’t have known how hungry I was for a kind touch from you. Your warm hands, large, cracked with paint.

You looked at me and bit your lip, and you said—oh yes, I remember the words—you said so quietly, “I know you have other friends. But you can always talk to me, if you choose. I know something of what it’s like to live underneath a weight.”

You couldn’t have known how those words would pierce through me.

I wish I could make what happened next sound dignified. But we were both there, and you and I both know there was nothing at all dignified in the way I fell into your arms then, or the way I wept into your shoulder. I never meant for you to see me so clearly. But you only went on holding me, your arms the only thing left real for me, the only thing with weight. You were so much more solid than I had ever felt. As if I were only an idea, and you the body that had been destined to possess it. I might have stayed there forever being held by you, and it still would not have been nothing.

But that isn’t what happened next.

What happened next was that you drew back to look at me, and you brushed your hand along my brow, and you said—”nothing” to you, perhaps, but I will never forget it—”A cruel world, if someone like you can be in pain in it.”

I don’t know how it happened next. Maybe you do. Maybe you have a set of rote actions you deploy at times like these, and what happened was only to be expected. It was not expected for me. All I knew was that your lips were pressed to mine, and you kissed me, and nothing else on this earth could have felt so terrifying or so right.

Your lips tasted of wine, and I could almost feel myself growing drunk from them. I had never kissed another man before—I scarcely knew what to think, what to do. I must have seemed pathetic to you. A child, to gasp as I did at such a little thing, a kiss.

Almost before I realized what had happened, you pulled away, your face burning. You wouldn’t meet my eyes. Already you were reaching for your coat.

“Forgive me,” you said brusquely, and I heard the hate in your voice, the regret, the loathing. “Drink leaves me foolish. It was nothing. Think nothing of it.”

And you were gone.

I am half-ashamed to tell you how long I stood there staring after you. It was as if you had knocked over my entire world, leaving me stranded among the pieces. I could think of nothing else. I can still think of nothing else.

You despise me—you were mocking me—I disappointed you—I revolt you—the thoughts spin and spin, and I lie here awake in bed and think of them and hate myself and think of you and hate myself the more, and soon it will be day.

I wrote this with no intention at all of sending it. It would not be the first unsent letter I have written you. But now, I find myself reckless. I no longer care what happens to me, whether this letter will undo me. I have nothing to lose that I do not already believe myself to have lost.

But if I am to hurt like this, it’s only just that you should understand how cruelly you’ve tormented a heart that isn’t strong enough for games.

If this is to be our last correspondence, so be it. At least I will have spoken honestly, perhaps for the first time in my life.

Enjolras

* * *

7 May

R,

I write to you quietly, doubting whether I should even do so. It’s past midnight, the date of this letter only minutes old. You’re asleep in the other room—I hear your snores, though feel no shame for disturbing me, I enjoy them. I take comfort in the idea that at least one of us is sleeping.

It is a foolish thing, I know, to write to you when we are so close, when only hours ago we were closer than I have ever been with another person on God’s earth. Still. Humor me. I find my words come easier when I need not say them to your face.

You have been nothing but generous at every turn of this—whatever _this_ is—and I thank you for it. I cannot think it easy for someone like you to have slowed yourself to the pace of someone like me, but you did so, and never once complained. You even made me feel, at the time, that you had no complaint at all you wished to make. A kind lie, if a lie it was, and I thank you for that as well.

It was an experience I will treasure, for however many days remain to me in this life to think of it. The memory of your body warm against mine, and, more than anything else, the sound of your voice as you whispered my own name in my ear, not your mocking nicknames but my real name, _mine._

You and I, as I have said, approach the business of intercourse in different manners. It is not a question of need for me, not a question of instinct. But I wanted you to know that I have never felt so deeply, so essentially safe as I did when you held me and spoke my name. Safety isn’t a feeling that comes easily to me, and know that I treasure it all the more for that. When I bared my feelings to you, I never dared dream that this might be the result.

Doubtless by the time you read this letter, I will already be gone. Judging from your snores, consciousness is still some ways off, and I have business in the library as soon as I can manage it.

Do me a kindness and burn this letter once you have read it. If you come to tonight’s meeting, say nothing to anyone, and behave to me as you've done before. It's simpler this way. Lock the door when you leave.

E

* * *

28 May

R,

This secrecy is not unbearable. It cannot be unbearable if we have no choice but to bear it.

Don’t write to me again asking for what I cannot give you: acknowledgement, openness, passion, obsession. I cannot give you that.

I am giving you all that my heart can hold. If it isn’t enough for you, perhaps our souls are not so well-matched as you said that night. Perhaps the wine clouded your judgment. In the sober light of this letter, see me clearly now. I am this, and nothing more.

E

* * *

2 June

R,

Come tonight, if you can. It is a dark night, and I would dearly love not to be alone.

E

* * *

3 June

R,

You didn’t finish your question to me this afternoon, when the crush of activity from the news of General Lamarque’s death threw the room into an uproar. But I know you well enough by now to guess what the question was. And the answer is no, it doesn't matter.

If we're outgunned and outmanned, if the charge is hopeless, if there are others who would mourn the loss of me should our insurrection fail, it means nothing. You knew this, I think, before you asked. I’ve never hidden it.

This cause is my God, R. It’s the only thing I have to believe in. It’s the only thing I will die for, and if I must die, I will do it—if not gladly—then with my eyes open at the last.

If all you have to say is another attempt to dissuade me from the upcoming action, then don’t respond. If you wish to take the time we have—and I hope you do wish it, it’s what I wish—then come after sundown, by the back stair. If this is all there is to be, my dear cynic, let us not spend our last few hours in anger and regret.

E

* * *

4 June

R,

Don’t come tomorrow.

Stay far from the quartier. Stay indoors. Stay away from a fight you have no heart in. I'll breathe more easily in the streets if I can be certain that you’re safe.

Please, R. No futile heroics. Do not come.

Yours,

E

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos are dearly, dearly appreciated <3


End file.
